Question from user:
We recently got Salesforce set up and we would like to have what people clicked on tracked through Google Analytics, as that is where we have our website data.
That and we have a limited number of seats and the people who look at the email tracking don’t need to do anything else with Salesforce so it won’t make sense to pay for a seat when that’s all they need it for.
I know we can manually put UTM trackers at the end of URLs, but I was wondering if there is a more integrated process to be able to bring tracking data over to Google Analytics.
I see there is the GA integration for Marketing Cloud and am in the process of seeing if we have the pre-reqs for that (or if it costs extra). Would that include some sort of integration with TargetX email campaigns or is that analytics for other tools?
Any helpful suggestions or links would be greatly appreciated.
Answer from Nabil:
That is a great question that hits on a common challenge when integrating specialized email systems like TargetX with a general web analytics platform like Google Analytics, especially when trying to bypass the manual UTM tagging method and keep your Salesforce user costs down.
The short answer is that while the Marketing Cloud integration for Google Analytics is designed for Marketing Cloud, not TargetX, there is a more integrated, custom solution you can build leveraging the underlying platform architecture.
Given that TargetX is a Salesforce-native system, the clicks and engagement data you are interested in are primarily stored in Salesforce objects, which you confirmed are what the non-Salesforce users need access to.
While manually adding UTM parameters to every link in every email works, it is prone to error and inconsistency.
A superior, more scalable approach involves a server-side tagging and data transmission flow that leverages the Salesforce API for the source data and the Google Analytics Data API to get the data into GA, orchestrated by Google Tag Manager (GTM) and a server-side endpoint like Stape or your own Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment.
Here is why this is a better path: TargetX, at its core, uses the Salesforce API for data exchange, including the recording of email link clicks as events or activities on a contact’s record.
You can configure a Salesforce process – such as a scheduled Apex job or a flow triggered by the click events – to extract this specific email engagement data (like the contact ID, campaign name, and click time) and send it to an intermediary data layer.
This intermediary layer can be a dedicated server-side environment like Stape or a serverless function in GCP.
Google Tag Manager is then used to receive this data stream.
Because the Salesforce API is the reliable backbone of TargetX operations, using it directly for extraction is the most integrated, non-manual method.
The key is including the Google Analytics Client ID, which you can capture on your website with GTM and then push to a custom Salesforce field on the lead or contact record, linking the email event back to the user’s web session in GA.
Once the click data is pushed to GTM’s server container, you use the Google Analytics Data API to send it as a non-interactive event – for example, a custom targetx_email_click event – into your Google Analytics property.
This is a much cleaner way to attribute the email click event directly to the website user, providing the full journey data without requiring a Salesforce seat for analytics users and without the errors of manual UTM tagging.
By sending a custom event like targetx_email_click with details like campaign_name and link_url as event parameters, you get rich data that is consistent and automatically captured server-side, offering a true picture of the user’s path from email to website activity.
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